An Atypical Life

Well, if you’ve visited my website in the last day, you’ll see I’ve added my plurk widget to the sidebar. I’m finding plurk altogether more motivational than twitter. A recent comparison of the two services I think was unfair to plurk, mostly due to overhyped twitter features that aren’t even working correctly half the time.

Even if Twitter solves their reliability concerns, plurk just feels more alive. It’s not a single thread with everyone’s crap mixed in (and hacks like #hashtags). It’s a threaded timeline: part web forum, part IM, and part IRC. And yes, a bit twitter, too. I like the fact that it’s Web 2.0 enough for my friends who won’t get on IRC (still my #1 place for synchronous) and that the web layout is attractive. The “get more points to get more features” thing is a pain, but I’d rather have that than some sort of “pay us $$ to get more features,” I think.

I moved over to plurk when some of my friends followed Leo Laporte over. I’m not a personality cult-er, but I do like keeping tabs on my friends. And I’m finding that plurk’s interface encourages more synchronous collaboration (read: chatting) than twitter ever did. In about 48h on the service I’ve managed 15 “plurks” (microblog entries) and 38 responses; I never hit that level of engagement with twitter.

Once they add some sort of SMS interface (I can’t get their IM interface to work…) it’ll be a sure fire hit, I think.

So you twitter types out there: would you miss me from twitter if i semi-abandoned it?

As the snow finally melts away, I start to get busier and busier. Here’s what I’ve been up to the past week:

• Work: supporting new projects as usual, writing position papers, working on newsletters, technical enablement, beta testing.
• House: cooking every night (pasta from scratch, ramen from scratch, gourmet hamburgers…will try and post some pics soon), planning garden, staring at wall that needs repairing and trying to motivate to fix it, regular cleaning, indoor gardening…
• School: Developing axiology, epistemology, methodology for design research approach. Gave guest lecture on internal Wikipedia politics.
• Other: Dealing with horrendous migraine. Developing novel database application. Attended One Of A Kind show with friends and got fabulous clothing, jewelry, housewares. Reverse engineering synth. Looking at motorcycle today. Petting cat to deal with stress from everything else i listed.

Here’s a photo collage of the most photogenic things I made for this year’s thing-a-day. Edit: If you can’t view the video below, the original is here.

I’d recommend thing-a-day to anyone who is looking to push their comfort zone and prove to themselves that they can be creative, and can produce something a day. It was eye-opening for me.

i am participating in this year’s thing-a-day exercise - to stimulate my creative juices.

Others I know or have just met who I will be following for thing-a-day:

• nyar
• dyslexia
• mithril
• …maybe you? Sign up today - last day to sign up!

some neat tidbits from the past 24h:

• the geminid meteors are coming:

  

• this week’s This American Life had a great bit on Nauru, an island I keep forgetting about.
• by 2100, North American Great Lakes “…water levels are expected to fall by 1.5 to 8 feet…because of the higher temperatures.”
• The Depreciation Guild is a neat 2-guitar and 1-Famicom (8 bit chip music) band. You can download their entire album, encoded at a very high bit rate, gratis. (Give them money anyway!) You can also read about the NES-Shoegazer genre.
• oh, did I mention? chumby is way cool.

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Earlier this week I finally received my Chumby, a small soft hardware device with a color touch-screen, speakers, an accelerometer sensor and squeeze switch (amongst other features). It took until this weekend for me to unwrap it and hook it up.

There are plenty of other blogs describing the out-of-the-box experience, so I’ll just briefly mention my first impressions:

1. The device’s build quality is good, but I had been hoping for more out of the squeeze sensor than what’s built in.
2. Just in case you didn’t pick it up from other posts, this is a tethered device - requires a “wall-wart” power adapter. I may look into short-life-span battery power for the thing, primarily because I see this developing into an audience-interactive MIDI controller (assuming I ever perform live again).
3. It was very, very simple to get up and running.
4. If you have a full-length WPA2 password on your wireless, be prepared to “type blind”. The entry box isn’t large enough to display every character. On the confirmation screen it will display the entire password for you.
5. Yay Linux.
6. Yay SSHD built right into the control panel (through a hidden screen).
7. I need to re-study ActionScript. At least there is an open-source flash development alternative. The last place I used this stuff would have been for former employer DentsuFUSE and the Dentsu Ad Museum (anyone in Tokyo know if the exhibit is still running?)

The following picture should say it all (yes, that’s ICHC on the chumby) :

If Ecchi approves, it’s a guaranteed hit.

• I managed to get my confidence in gaming again, though I am still having hand/eye coordination issues. Katamari Damacy was what did it, and without selling my soul to the PS2. Half an hour of play is enough to last me all day. Talk about a far better game than Kingdom Hearts!  (Really, I just like crossover stories. The gameplay in KH is awful. Talk about a button masher.)
• Oh, yeah, I’m talking at CASCON 2007 this year. I’m presenting tomorrow on Education in the 21st century, and how new technology affects how we teach, think and learn. My focus continues to be on affordances of synchronous environments. IRC will be a big part of the presentation, which focuses on our GRAIL project and research @ U of T’s OISE. Research conducted under the guidance of Dr. Clare Brett.
• Few weeks ago Chris and I started work on the workshop & garage. (OK, he’s been doing most of the work. But I am helping!) I snapped some arsty shots of the foundation in progress, and am feeding them into Lightroom now. I’ll have the pics online shortly, once I’m satisfied that any of them are any good.
• I’ve realized that the only reason I haven’t been entertaining others more often at my place is a lack of reaching out to people I know (and would like to meet) in the city. Intentionally sticking to “othered” space tends to result in this sort of isolation. Perhaps it’s time to kick off Friday night “red wine and games” again?

so I tried. I tried to play a 3-4 year old game (Kingdom Hearts, PS2) and failed miserably. I can’t even get past the first level, where you’re mock-dueling with characters on the beach. I lose every time. I just can’t get the hang of the first-person interface, keep losing who I’m attacking (even with the lock-on), and just get pummeled to bits trying to avoid their attacks.

Apparently I am no longer a capable gamer. :( And this is a Disney game, folks!

Man do I feel old!

Maybe I’m just frustrated too easily, and falling prey to the “the more frustrated you are, the worse you perform.”

[Edit: I managed to get through 3 of the 4 characters. Then I tried 3-on-me, and couldn't get past that. So I can advance, but SLOWLY. Far more slowly than I can with games that aren't based on an FPS interface. Guess I need to build those skills...or give up forever...but hopefully the former, if I can be patient enough with myself!]

Anyone out there know anything about linux-raid (md) and support for sata (libata) hotplug? I’ve got access to this machine that has an external 4-bay SATA enclosure that has smart trays. Pull the lever, the drive spins down, you swap it out. (This avoids having to implement what the libata guys are talking about, though I’d like to see this support added as well.)

I’d like to, in the event of drive failure, just pull the drive and replace it, without monkeying around at the CLI. But even though libata supports hotplug, and the tray takes care of the details (no emergency head dumps, no drive wear, etc.) I don’t think md is happy about it. At the moment I think I’d have to remove the drive from the array, then pull it, then add a new one, then add the drive to the array.

The latest linux-raid post on it I could find is about a year old and shows no progress on a solution.

Thoughts?